We all have our individual impressions of IBM, many from the 1960s, when the company was seen as the safest source of business processing support. Led for 40 years by Thomas J. Watson, Sr., as an enlightened source of mechanical computing capability based on punch cards. There would inevitably be challenges of corporate and family (and technological) succession. Tom Watson, Jr., became the internal champion of transitioning the firm to electronic computing. And he may have been the only person who could oppose his father in a company built on yes men; apparently, his own motivation to transform IBM was an intense antipathy toward his father.
Marc Wortman, PhD, is a multi-award-winning independent historian and freelance journalist. He is the author of five books on American military, technology, and social history, most recently The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age (PublicAffairs, 2023). A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, it is the first solo biography of the leader who launched the computer revolution. The U.S. Military History Group named his previous book, Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power (Yale University Press, 2022), winner of the 2023 Captain Richard Lukaszewicz Memorial Book Award as the outstanding military history book of the year.
His other books are 1941: Fighting the Shadow War, A Divided America in a World at War (Atlantic Monthly, 2016); The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta (PublicAffairs, 2009), and The Millionaires’ Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented American Air Power (PublicAffairs, 2006). A feature-length documentary based on The Millionaires’ Unit is available on streaming services.
Following college at Brown University, he received a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. He lives with his family in New Haven.